The present invention generally provides methods and systems for facilitating the delivery of content items and interaction with content items in a television environment. More specifically, the present invention provides methods and systems that facilitate the simultaneous delivery of a plurality of items of content, including content associated with one or more users in a given social network, as well as the interaction among one or more users in a television viewing environment.
Systems for distributing TV content are generally well known to those of skill in the art. Over the past several decades, the number of systems designed for the distribution and consumption of TV content has proliferated, while the number of available channels of TV content has skyrocketed. For example, viewers are now able to consume TV content over cable, over the air broadcast, satellite, fiber optic, as well as other point (and multipoint) to multipoint distribution systems, each potentially offering several hundred channels of scheduled and on-demand TV content. Consumers have had difficulty in effectively utilizing the pool of available TV content due to a lack of useful tools for analyzing programming to determine the TV content that is potentially the most enjoyable or relevant to the user. Furthermore, the viewing of TV content has heretofore been an essentially solitary experience outside of viewing TV content with another individual located at the same location.
In order to overcome these shortcomings and other problems associated with existing apparatuses and techniques for viewing TV content, embodiments of the present invention provide systems and methods for both a shared viewing experience of TV content, as well as providing messenger and messenger related services and content within the framework of viewing TV content. Moreover, embodiments of the present invention provide for interaction among a plurality of users for a community viewing environment.